Poshmark is a social marketplace for fashion enthusiasts and secondary market sellers, fostering a community-driven experience where users interact, follow, and share listings. Its goal is to empower sellers to turn unused items into cash, but casual sellers often drop off, opting for competitors like Mercari and Facebook Marketplace due to frustration with Poshmark's complex features. Professional "ambassador" Poshers dominate visibility by using third-party bots, disadvantaging casual sellers who lack the commitment to optimize their listings. In my role as product lead, I led a team that explored this issue, learned from casual sellers, and designed a prototype for a Seller Hub to simplify discovery metrics and tasks, leveling the playing field and making social selling on Poshmark engaging and fun.
RESEARCH
Secondary Research
Competitive Analysis
Task Analysis
User Interviews
IDEATE
User Personas
User Stories
Design Studio
User Flows
DESIGN
Sketching
Lo-Fi Wireframes
Hi-Fi Wireframes
Test Prototype
ITERATE
Concept Testing
Iteration of Hi-Fi Prototype
Annual sales less than $2,500
Started selling on Poshmark within past two years
Not exclusive to Poshmark and have tried other platforms
Listing items on the side and not as their primary business
40%
casual sellers who have continued
engagement and report successful selling
40%
casual sellers who have left the platform and report unsuccessful selling
20%
casual sellers who reported success but still left the platform
IDENTIFYING USER PROBLEMS
Casual sellers need an easier way to manage their listings and know what to do next. They struggle with understanding how to use the platform's discovery funnels and feel lost after posting their items.
Casual sellers need a simpler way to use the social features for their listings. The current methods of relisting, sharing, and making offers are too time-consuming for regular use.
Casual sellers want tools to easily keep track of their selling progress on the platform. They feel motivated by positive feedback and knowing they are on the right track.
IDEATING SOLUTIONS
Design of a centralized Seller Hub feature that provides structure and routine for casual sellers, while also educating them on best practices for post-listing activity.
Allow sellers to complete post-listing actions such as sharing, relisting, and offering in a streamlined process that minimizes the amount of taps and screens the user must go through to make the tasks manageable on a recurring basis.
Create a targeted gamification system within the Seller Hub to allow sellers to understand and track their progress, create deeper engagement with post-listing activity, and motivate sellers with badges and rewards.
SKETCHING AND WIREFRAMING
My design process started with user flows and sketching of concepts guided by our user research, and moved into low-fi wireframes as the Seller Hub took shape. My goal in this design was to create a new feature within the Poshmark platform that gives sellers a gameplan for closing sales, the ability to track and understand their progress, and efficient and meaningful engagement with core aspects of the seller journey to optimize and maintain visibility to potential buyers.
CREATING A GAMEPLAN WITH THE SELLER HUB
The Poshmark Seller Hub was designed to provide a post-listing gameplan for sellers, with streamlined and centralized task management that makes it easy for sellers to optimize the exposure of their listings.
STREAMLINING SELLER TASKS
Casual sellers were often frustrated by the time and effort required to share, relist, and make offers to likers, as these tasks are scattered throughout the platform, require too many steps, and are performed for individual listings. The Seller Hub makes sharing, offering, and relisting simple and easy for all active listings.
GAMIFICATION OF THE SELLER JOURNEY
A badge system and streak rewards were implemented in the Seller Hub to give sellers a deeper level of engagement with post-listing metrics, allowing them to earn badges to display in their Closet and redeemable rewards for continuing weekly streaks of completing tasks to maintain listing visibility.
Overall, this was a very challenging project, as Poshmark is an inherently complex social selling platform and the problems facing sellers on the platform are both varied and ambiguous. However, my team did a tremendous job of uncovering user pain points and keeping focus on the casual seller’s journey in creating the Seller Hub.
In preparing and conducting concept testing, one major point of learning for me was the difficulty you can sometimes experience in sourcing suitable participants, especially where you are looking for a certain subset of the platform’s ideal user. I quickly learned that, while you can get a great deal of interested participants through LinkedIn and other social media posts, these candidates are often not your ideal user, but seeking to participate to simply gain an offered incentive. Thoroughly vetting test candidates is a must, as participants who are dishonest about their experience with the platform have no valuable insight to offer. Sometimes testing with 3 ideal users is better than testing with 10 participants who don’t have any real experience to offer actionable insight.
More testing will only serve to strengthen the value proposition of the Seller Hub, but I am confident that the Seller Hub is built on a strong foundation of understanding and empathizing with the casual seller experience. I’m looking forward to continuing to iterate on parts of the Seller Hub to further refine the task flows and rewards system, and equally looking forward to the positive impact the Seller Hub could have on casual sellers who want to understand how to sell on Poshmark and manage their visibility with ease.
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